President Bush has appointed
a former aide to the American oil company Unocal, Afghan-born Zalmay Khalilzad,
as special envoy to Afghanistan. The nomination was announced December
31, nine days after the US-backed interim government of Hamid Karzai took
office in Kabul.

The nomination underscores the real
economic and financial interests at stake in the US military intervention
in Central Asia. Khalilzad is intimately involved in the long-running US
efforts to obtain direct access to the oil and gas resources of the region,
largely unexploited but believed to be the second largest in the world
after the Persian Gulf.

As an adviser for Unocal, Khalilzad
drew up a risk analysis of a proposed gas pipeline from the former Soviet
republic of Turkmenistan across Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian
Ocean. He participated in talks between the oil company and Taliban officials
in 1997, which were aimed at implementing a 1995 agreement to build the
pipeline across western Afghanistan.

Unocal was the lead company in the
formation of the Centgas consortium, whose purpose was to bring to market
natural gas from the Dauletabad Field in southeastern Turkmenistan, one
of the world’s largest. The $2 billion project involved a 48-inch diameter
pipeline from the Afghanistan-Turkmenistan border, passing near the cities
of Herat and Kandahar, crossing into Pakistan near Quetta and linking with
existing pipelines at Multan. An additional $600 million extension to India
was also under consideration.

Khalilzad also lobbied publicly for
a more sympathetic US government policy towards the Taliban. Four years
ago, in an op-ed article in the Washington Post, he defended the Taliban
regime against accusations that it was a sponsor of terrorism, writing,
“The Taliban does not practice the anti-U.S. style of fundamentalism practiced
by Iran.”

“We should ... be willing to offer
recognition and humanitarian assistance and to promote international economic
reconstruction,” he declared. “It is time for the United States to reengage”
the Afghan regime. This “reengagement” would, of course, have been enormously
profitable to Unocal, which was otherwise unable to bring gas and oil to
market from landlocked Turkmenistan.

Khalilzad only shifted his position
on the Taliban after the Clinton administration fired cruise missiles at
targets in Afghanistan in August 1998, claiming that terrorists under the
direction of Afghan-based Osama bin Laden were responsible for bombing
US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. One day after the attack, Unocal put
Centgas on hold. Two months later it abandoned all plans for a trans-Afghan
pipeline. The oil interests began to look towards a post-Taliban Afghanistan,
and so did their representatives in the US national security establishment.

Liasion to Islamic guerrillas

Born in Mazar-e Sharif in 1951, Khalilzad
hails from the old ruling elite of Afghanistan. His father was an aide
to King Zahir Shah, who ruled the country until 1973. Khalilzad was a graduate
student at the University of Chicago, an intellectual center for the American
right-wing, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979.

Khalilzad became an American citizen,
while serving as a key link between US imperialism and the Islamic fundamentalist
mujahedin fighting the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul—the milieu out of
which both the Taliban and bin Laden’s Al Qaeda group arose. He was a special
adviser to the State Department during the Reagan administration, lobbying
successfully for accelerated US military aid to the mujahedin, including
hand-held Stinger anti-aircraft missiles which played a key role in the
war. He later became undersecretary of defense in the administration of
Bush’s father, during the US war against Iraq, then went to the Rand Corporation,
a top US military think tank.

After Bush was installed as president
by a 5-4 vote of the US Supreme Court, Khalilzad headed the Bush-Cheney
transition team for the Defense Department and advised incoming Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Significantly, however, he was not named to
a subcabinet position, which would have required Senate confirmation and
might have provoked uncomfortable questions about his role as an oil company
adviser in Central Asia and intermediary with the Taliban. Instead, he
was named to the National Security Council, where no confirmation vote
was needed.

At the NSC Khalilzad reports to Condoleeza
Rice, the national security adviser, who also served as an oil company
consultant on Central Asia. After serving in the first Bush administration
from 1989 to 1992, Rice was placed on the board of directors of Chevron
Corporation and served as its principal expert on Kazakhstan, where Chevron
holds the largest concession of any of the international oil companies.
The oil industry connections of Bush and Cheney are well known, but little
has been said in the media about the prominent role being played in Afghan
policy by officials who advised the oil industry on Central Asia.

One of the few commentaries in the
America media about this aspect of the US military campaign appeared in
the San Francisco Chronicle last September 26. Staff writer Frank Viviano
observed: “The hidden stakes in the war against terrorism can be summed
up in a single word: oil. The map of terrorist sanctuaries and targets
in the Middle East and Central Asia is also, to an extraordinary degree,
a map of the world’s principal energy sources in the 21st century.... It
is inevitable that the war against terrorism will be seen by many as a
war on behalf of America’s Chevron, Exxon, and Arco; France’s TotalFinaElf;
British Petroleum; Royal Dutch Shell and other multinational giants, which
have hundreds of billions of dollars of investment in the region.”

Silence in the media

This reality is well understood in
official Washington, but the most important corporate-controlled media
outlets—the television networks and major national daily newspapers—have
maintained silence that amounts to deliberate, politically motivated self-censorship.

The sole recent exception is an article
which appeared December 15 in the New York Times business section, headlined,
“As the War Shifts Alliances, Oil Deals Follow.” The Times reported, “The
State Department is exploring the potential for post-Taliban energy projects
in the region, which has more than 6 percent of the world’s proven oil
reserves and almost 40 percent of its gas reserves.”

The Times noted that during a visit
in early December to Kazakhstan, “Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said
he was ‘particularly impressed’ with the money that American oil companies
were investing there. He estimated that $200 billion could flow into Kazakhstan
during the next 5 to 10 years.”

Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham
also pushed US oil investments in the region during a November visit to
Russia, on which he was accompanied by David J. O’Reilly, chairman of ChevronTexaco.

Defense Secretary Rumsfeld has also
played a role in the ongoing oil pipeline maneuvers. During a December
14 visit to Baku, capital of Azerbaijan, he assured officials of the oil-rich
Caspian state that the administration would lift sanctions imposed in 1992
in the wake of the conflict with Armenia over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Both Azerbaijan and Armenia have
aligned themselves with the US military thrust into Central Asia, offering
the Pentagon transit rights and use of airfields. Rumsfeld’s visit and
his conciliatory remarks were the reward. Rumsfeld told President Haydar
Aliyev that the administration had reached agreement with congressional
leaders to waive the sanctions.

On November 28 the White House released
a statement hailing the official opening of the first new pipeline by the
Caspian Pipeline Consortium, a joint venture of Russia, Kazakhstan, Oman,
ChevronTexaco, ExxonMobil and several other oil companies. The pipeline
connects the huge Tengiz oilfield in northwestern Kazakhstan to the Russian
Black Sea port of Novorossiysk, where tankers are loaded for the world
market. US companies put up $1 billion of the $2.65 billion construction
cost.

The Bush statement declared, “The
CPC project also advances my Administration’s National Energy Policy by
developing a network of multiple Caspian pipelines that also includes the
Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan, Baku-Supsa, and Baku-Novorossiysk oil pipelines and
the Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum gas pipeline.”

There was little US press coverage
of this announcement. Nor did the media refer to the fact that the pipeline
consortium involved in the Baku-Ceyhan plan, led by the British oil company
BP, is represented by the law firm of Baker & Botts. The principal
attorney at this firm is James Baker III, secretary of state under Bush’s
father and chief spokesman for the 2000 Bush campaign during its successful
effort to shut down the Florida vote recount.